Credits
Official selection
Sundance Film Festival 2022
Director
Lena Dunham
Writer
Lena Dunham
Cast
Jon Bernthal, Lena Dunham, Kristine Froseth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Luka Sabbat
Editor
Catrin Hedström
contact
Elevation Pictures
USA
2022 87 mins
OV English
Genre
Comedy
“A supremely funny film. A bold, exciting return.”- Cassie da Costa, VANITY FAIR
“Beautifully strange and brutally honest.”- Nick Allen, ROGEREBERT.COM
"Dunham's outrageous gambits pay off in unexpected humor; few go where she goes and win the way she does.”-Todd McCarthy, DEADLINE
Ten years after bringing GIRLS to the world, Lena Dunham still has a lot to stay. In SHARP STICK, the naive Sarah Jo (an electric Kristine Froseth) undertakes a journey of sexual exploration and perversion in the hopes of catching up on years of lost time. As the film opens, she's a virginal 26-year-old babysitter living at home with her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and influencer sister, Treina (Taylour Paige, from ZOLA). As bold and open as her family is, Sarah Jo remains repressed, almost child-like in her approach to life and relationships, until she meets the father of the child she's taking care of, a brutishly sexy Jon Bernthal. As they strike up an intense sexual relationship, her life takes an awkwardly deranged turn for the worse.
Best taken as a modern-day fairy tale, the film toys with the fantasy of sex in our hyper-sexualized age. While some recent movies like PLEASURE and Ti West's X attempt to tackle the impact of pornography straight on, Dunham takes a compelling and often hilarious detour through the ways readily available sex has transformed our interpersonal relationships and desire itself. Dunham has lost none of her bite as a wry commentator on 21st-century norms and habits, which is provocative and occasionally infuriating. Often unrelenting in its honesty, the film doesn't allow for easy moralizing and forces the audience to take these people as they are—for better and worse. It also features a delicious cameo performance by Scott Speedman as Sarah Jo's porn-star fetish object with a handy 1-800 number. – Justine Smith
Showings
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